Our Eyak Athabaskan people have lived along the Copper River Delta and eastern Prince William Sound for the last 3,500 years. We migrated from the interior of Alaska over the glaciers to the Gulf of Alaska coastline where retreating glaciers formed a thin green strip of habitat and rivers near Yakutat (an Eyak word that means “Lagoon behind the Sea, where the Canoes Rest”). We Eyaks never numbered over 1,000 in existence because the sparse habitat and access to resources limited our growth, along with interactions and tribal wars with and between Tlingit, Aleut and Chugach Eskimo tribes.

The Gwich’In people say, “We are the Caribou people; we are the Caribou.” We Eyaks are the wild Copper River Salmon people; we are the wild Copper River Salmon. We are also the traditional ancestral stewards of the Copper River Delta region.

Our identity and name come from where we established our subsistence villages. Eyak means “Throat of the Lake, where the lake becomes the river.” We chose these particular sites because that is where the freshest wild salmon enter the lakes to return to where they were spawned 4-5 years earlier.

Salmon are different when they swim the rivers and enter the lakes. While silvery in the ocean, once in fresh water their gills no longer filter the sea but silt. As a result, the salmon turn bright red; their skin gets leathery and the flesh super oily, as they pair up to reproduce, spawn and die, and complete their life cycle. This is the cycle of life on which we depend.